Each week the National Anti-Vivisection Society (NAVS) sends out an email alert called “Take Action Thursday,” which tells subscribers about current actions they can take to help animals. NAVS is a national, not-for-profit educational organization incorporated in the State of Illinois. NAVS promotes greater compassion, respect and justice for animals through educational programs based on respected ethical and scientific theory and supported by extensive documentation of the cruelty and waste of vivisection. You can register to receive these action alerts and more at the NAVS Web site. This week’s “Take Action Thursday” looks at a great apes Department of Defense Best Practices Act, animal terrorism, and cloning.

April 16 begins World Laboratory Animal Liberation Week, when the focus of many animal advocacy groups is on activism to end the use of animals for research. This edition of the NAVS legislative alert is dedicated to issues having to do with animals used in science, starting with the reintroduction of the federal Great Ape Protection Act, federal legislation on the use of animals by the Department of Defense and a state position on cloned animals.

Animal cloning is perceived differently by animal advocates than by individuals with concerns about the safety of food produced by the offspring of cloned animals. Cloning—a process to create a genetically identical animal with all the traits of a single parent in order to preserve the qualities of an exceptional individual animal—is riddled with animal welfare concerns. The first efforts at cloning produced offspring that were subjected to miscarriages, stillbirths, and serious birth defects. Cloning continues to result in a high incidence of death and deformity to animals, in particular cattle and sheep. While the procedure to produce cloned animals has become more commercially available, the cloning process results in a huge price paid in animal suffering.

During World Laboratory Animal Liberation Week, please take action to end the suffering and waste of vivisection by contacting your elected officials regarding numerous bills. Or choose a model law to bring to your legislator’s attention and ask him/her to support the introduction of a bill in your state that will help end the suffering of animals in the laboratory.

Federal Legislation

The Great Ape Protection and Cost Savings Act has been introduced in the House of Representatives and the Senate to prohibit conducting invasive research on great apes. HR 1513 and S 810 were introduced on April 13, 2011, but the bills are not yet available on the government’s website.

The purpose of this legislation is to:

– Phase out invasive research on great apes;
– Prohibit the transport of great apes for purposes of invasive research;
– Prohibit breeding great apes for purposes of invasive research; and
– Require the provision of lifetime care of federally-owned or controlled great apes in a suitable sanctuary for the permanent retirement of apes.

Please watch the NAVS website for more information, a “Take Action” letter, and a full list of sponsors for these bills.

A newly revised “BEST Practices AcT” has been introduced in the House of Representatives as HR 1417. This bill replaces HR 403, extending the effective date of the bill, eliminating reference to the use of animals in chemical and biological casualty management, but also providing a clearer justification for why this bill should be passed. Fully titled “The Battlefield Excellence Through Superior Training (BEST) Practices Act,” this bill would require the Department of Defense (DOD) to adopt the use of human-based methods for training members of the armed forces in the treatment of combat trauma injuries. DOD currently uses more than 6,000 live animals each year to train physicians, medics, corpsmen, and other personnel on responding to severe battlefield injuries. Generally the animals are shot, burned or maimed to simulate battlefield injuries. A report published by DOD in 2009 indicated that high-fidelity simulators would be available for training and education by 2014. Both bills were introduced by Representative Bob Filner (CA), Ranking Democratic Member of the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs. HR 1417 already has nine co-sponsors.

Minnesota HF 1369 and SF 1118 are proposing changes that would, among other things, make it unlawful to take undercover video or photographs of abuses at animal facilities. These bills are a variation of often debated animal enterprise terrorism legislation which target animal activists instead of addressing real issues of institutional animal abuse. While these bills codify as a crime activities that are already criminal—such as breaking into a laboratory or farming operation and destroying property—the provisions in the section, “Animal Facility Interference,” directly address activities that are undertaken by animal activists in order to expose animal abuse. Proponents of these bills claim that their intent is to protect the confidentiality of business practices. But the reality is that individuals who film the treatment of animals in farms, livestock markets, research facilities, veterinary offices, pounds, animal shelters, pet shops, boarding kennels and commercial kennels only threaten these commercial interests when they find evidence of animal abuse. While NAVS does not condone violent and destructive action or breaking the law, we object to legislation that is aimed at preventing people from seeing the truth of how animals are really treated—and how some commercial enterprises are violating the law.

In Ohio, HB 171 has been introduced to prohibit human cloning, along with any effort to create a human-animal hybrid through the transference of a human embryo into a non-human or a non-human embryo into a human. While this may sound like science fiction to many, the technology exists to conduct experiments along these lines, without sufficient ethical checks in place to stop it. Unfortunately, this bill does not prohibit current research involving the use of transgenic animal models containing human genes, which can cause tremendous suffering to the millions of mice and rats bred or genetically engineered to be used in experiments each year.

A proposal considered by the European Parliament to ban the sale of meat and milk from the descendants of cloned animals failed last month as the European Union (EU) Council and the European Commission refused to consider a ban on anything other than the cloned animals themselves. Initially it was thought that a compromise could be reached in labeling meat from cloned cattle now and eventually labeling food from the offspring of these clones. But any compromise was ultimately rejected, leaving the marketing and sale of products from the offspring of cloned animals unregulated—and therefore unlabeled. In a random survey of EU residents, “58% of respondents considered cloning for food to be ‘unjustified'; 83% believed that food from clones should be labeled if put on sale, and 63% said it was ‘unlikely’ they would buy such food.” It is the unwillingness of consumers to buy products that they know is from cloned animals that resulted in the failure to reach any compromise on labeling such food products. This decision ended three-years of negotiations on this divisive issue.

"Service Animal" Scammers (New Yorker): An increasing number of your neighbors have been keeping company with their pets in human-only establishments simply by claiming that the creatures are their licensed companion animals and are necessary to their mental well-being.